Merry Christmas from the Draughty Old Fen!

Being a typical bloke, I left my Christmas shopping until the last possible moment, and, having unexpetedly had to work late, found myself chaining my bike to a railing in town as many of the smaller streets were covered in a solid sheet of ice.

Maxima had asked for a Slanket which, she explained, was a blanket with sleeves. She wasn't impressed when I'd offered to cut armholes in one of our blankets, so I inched manfully along the ice but all the shops in Cambridge that might have one had sold out, and by the time I'd searched through them all the shop that I'd identified as selling her back-up present had shut. So I've included a note saying "IOU a Slanket" in the box of goodies containing more things to decorate one's nails than a sensible person would want to own.

I'd wanted to leave the next day, Christmas Eve free, as we had to take poor old Granum, Professor Calculus' dog, to the vet. On our return our cat Magus was jumping jubilantly round the house, having apparently ascribed its doglessness to his sulking valiantly in Minora's room.

There was a Crib Service at St Gallicus during which lay ministers Significatia and Peripatetica helped Rector Pellegrina pick out children for a Nativity play, so there was no time for Hollywood hissy-fits about who would be Mary/shepherds/angels etc. The Star, a great gold-coloured icon on a stick, was followed round in procession by a constellation of angels, shepherds, kings, Joseph, Mary with doll, donkey and infants with tinsel headbands ringing bells (I haven't worked out that last one). I'm always affected when children sing Away in a Manger.

Later in the night, after an hour's nap, we left for a Midnight Service of Communion, celebrated by Pellegrina at St Gallicus' high altar with the altar-rails moved up from their usual position. It was a beautiful service and what was best was to be joined by Minora, who has been expressing doubts about her faith.

It was alarming to come home, switch on the radio and hear news of the Pope being knocked down as he processed through St Peter's to celebrate Midnight Mass. I pray he's ok; the incident highlights his willingness to take the same risks as his predecessor, John Paul II, in order to be close to his people.

I note in finishing that the Met Office (remember, the guys who helped lose the Medieval Warming Period?) has just declared a White Christmas. Personally I don't object to snow, but draw the line at sheets of ice and, with apologies to Bing, am dreaming of the end of this White Christmas!

A Merry Christmas to everybody out there, and my sympathy if you find this a difficult time of year.

"Tear down this wall!"

With only 365 days in the year, a lot of history is competing for a limited number of anniversaries.

Take November 9. In 1923, there was the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich, led by Adolf Hitler and Rudolf Hess, who would later decide that angels were telling him to negotiate a truce in the war to come and fly over to Scotland. Then in 1938, Kristallnacht began on the night of 9 November, seeing a stepping-up of the oppression of German Jews on the order of Hitler, ostensibly - says Tom Segev of Haaretz - as payback for the shooting of diplomat Ernst Vom Rath in Paris by young Polish Jew Herschel Grynszpan.

So I can appreciate why François Mitterand was jumpy about the Berlin Wall being taken apart bit by bit on the same day in 1989, starting when jetlagged German Communist Politburo member Günther Schabowski announced that border restrictions would be relaxed "as far as I know, effective immediately".

Mitterrand warned Thatcher that a united German might make even more ground than Hitler had. Mitterand was possibly being somewhat disingenuous, given that preventing Germany from uniting had been a French goal since the days of Cardinal Richelieu in the 17th century due to fear of its military and economic power - France wanted to be the biggest bully on the block.

Thatcher was no fool and, on the feast of the Storming of the Bastille on 14 July of that year, had reminded a Mitterand who was getting overexcited over the effect of his country's revolutionary values of liberté, fraternité and egalité on Europe that the continent's foundations were, rather, Judaeo-Christian values.

So why was she so affected by Mitterrand's premonition? One possibility is that, having been born in 1925, she would have grown up with the travellers' tales of Great War Veterans, and turned 14 the month after the second round commenced in September 1939. But what the generation above her was too young to know much about was the 1871 Treaty of Versailles, whereby France was forced to recognise the existence of the German Empire in the palace's opulent Hall of Mirrors, which was reflected in a homonymous treaty signed in the same place 48 years later.

I make no bones about it: Communism formed exactly what Ronald Reagan called it in a 1983 speech: an evil empire. He was speaking to the (US) National Association of Evangelicals, and it would be another Christian, a great leader, who would join Reagan and Thatcher to form the triumvirate that would bring the fragile red tyrant crashing down like so many statues of Lenin. Pope John Paul II (Karol Wojtyła), having lived under both Nazi and Communist regimes, addressed his fellow Poles in 1979, enjoining them repeatedly "Do not be afraid!" Lech Walesa and his colleagues at the head of the then-illegal trade union Solidarity recognised their moment. (The Pope would, I think, have been horrified by East Germans too young to remember the global conflagration caused by the Franco-Teutonic double-act becoming Neo-Nazis because it was the only alternative to Communism - the sinister side of a phenomenon known as "Ostalgia". )

So how have we done since 1989? Judaeo-Christian values, for one thing, are ignored by the EU Constitution/Lisbon Treaty; East Germans who rushed through the crumbling Iron Curtain to experience the freedom of the West are now micromanaged to the level of what sort of lightbulbs they can buy, in the name of the new pantheism dressed up as a delusion that climate change is due to the actions of humankind; and, as the shadow of Mutually-Assured Destruction (MAD) recedes, destruction by fundamentalist suicidal maniacs is more likely than ever.

So it's fortuitous that this day of anniversaries falls in the no-man's land between Remembrance Sunday and Remembrance Day, as it exemplifies the law of unintended consequences writ on a scale that leads to war. And down the decades come echoing the great words of Ronald Reagan's that emboldened reformer Mikhail Gorbachev, speaking in 1987 near where JF Kennedy had declared himself a doughnut:

We welcome change and openness; for we believe that freedom and security go together, that the advance of human liberty can only strengthen the cause of world peace. There is one sign the Soviets can make that would be unmistakable, that would advance dramatically the cause of freedom and peace. General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization, come here to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!

it was 30 years ago today...

Being in my early teens when Margaret Thatcher was elected Prime Minister on Friday 4 May 1979, I was more interested in music than anything else; Jimmy Saville had presented Top of the Pops the night before, announcing, I think, Blondie at number 1 with Sunday Girl, which even my Mum, no rock fan, preferred to the previous incumbent Mike Batt's funereal Bright Eyes, sung by Art Garfunkel. Eurovision Song Contest winner Hallelujah, by Gali Atari and Milk & Honey, remained in the top ten, and I still think it beats the two number ones hands down. Gary Moore - in mid-divorce from Thin Lizzy - had made the top 30 with his genre-changing Parisienne Walkways. The Shadows, on their way to the top ten, had just gotten to number 40 with Cavatina, theme from The Deer Hunter.

I also remember - they're hard to forget - the strikes. Taken collectively, strikes in the winter of 1978-79 saw the largest withdrawal of labour in the country since 1926's General Strike. Gravediggers in the Liverpool area struck for higher pay for a fortnight, sparking fears that the area's dead might be buried at sea. It was one of the shorter strikes - ironic, since it became the cause célèbre of the period, and one of the reasons British scandal-rag The Sun christened the season the "winter of discontent". Many folk thought it a very cleverly-coined phrase, not realising it came from the opening line of Shakespeare's Richard III, where Gloucester is actually proclaiming the passing of said winter:

Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York;
And all the clouds that lour'd upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.

Mrs (now Baroness) Thatcher took advantage of Shakespeare's original theme of winter turning to "glorious summer" in her Party Political Broadcast of January 1979, which was subtitled "Winter of Discontent" (although she never used the misquote in her speech) and which the Margaret Thatcher Foundation archive of her speeches rates as "key".

There were far fewer strikes during the following Conservative administrations, for the simple reason that the Conservative Party did not and does not mortgage its agenda to false and dangerous promises - something even the Socialist Workers' Party recognised in a 2002 article laying out the Labour Party's many failures in 1974-79, entitled "We struck because Labour betrayed us."

Anybody who lived through the 1980s in Great Britain knows it was no tea party, but Margaret Thatcher, among many other things, reformed union voting procedure to bring it in line with democratic best practice and lessen the possibility of coercion; faced down the illegal, year-long miners' strike, which was ostensibly about pay and conditions but which National Union of Mineworkers leader Arthur Scargill intended as a precursor to violent regime change; and formed a triumvirate with Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II whose steadfast action and resistence to bullying was the sine qua non of Soviet communism's downfall.

In 1979, commercial punk having already burnt itself out, Abba had two albums in the year's top ten. It still has an album - Abba Gold - in this week's Top of the Pops top 40. Whereas in 1979 there was little evidence of the various forms of electronica which would feed upon the ashes of punk, it seems now that every innovation possible to popular music has been mined dry, and not only do we see bands that could stand proudly beside Blondie and her comrades-in-arms in the charts - like the Killers, the Kaiser Chiefs and Fleet Foxes - but old friends too: Chris de Burgh's album Footsteps is at no. 13, Carole King's Tapestry at 20 and Dusty Springfield at 30. And, of course, Bob Dylan, who released his first album in 1962, has just seen Together Through Life hit #1 in both the UK and the US.

Just so, we witness once more a sovietisation of British politics, with more quangos and committees than you can shake a stick at, and decisions that will have the greatest impact on British people taken away from the House of Commons. It didn't work before and it's not working now.

In the Winter of Discontent, rubbish was uncollected because of strikes; now it's not collected if it's the wrong kind of rubbish. Then, many NHS hospitals were only treating emergencies because of strikes; now, it's not unknown for people to come out of hospital sicker than when they went in because there is a surfeit of administrators and managers and a shortage of clinical staff on the ground.

Then, the actions of Labour, be it in exacerbating financial crises or personal feuding, led millions to vote Conservative who would never have thought of doing so before...funny how some things don't change, isn't it?

Margaret Thatcher's political legacy is alive and well and has changed politics, I believe, for many years to come. I believe that, when Gordon Brown (or his successor) finally suffers the British people to have an election, David Cameron will lead from the front, and return the House of Commons to it pre-eminent place that the respect the Conservative Party has for the British people demands it have.

Add in some good songs, and we might once more see the ice melting.

give them what they deserve

In the 1980's, the relationship between the Archbishop of Canterbury, the late Dr Robert Runcie, and the then Conservative government of Great Britain was often strained, yet I do not recall any loud calls for the Church of England to be disestablished form the state, merely rumblings that "the clergy should not interfere in politics". This is, of course, seen as the corollary of one translation of Matthew 22:21, when Jesus is asked whether it's lawful to pay taxes to the Romans, and famously replies, "give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and to God what belongs to God."

We're now facing calls for disestablishment, which would technically mean that Great Britain, despite its many Christians, would no longer be officially a Christian nation, and would move closer to being handed over to radical militants of various political and theological persuasions, and I fear that one of the strategies will be to try to pit the Church of England and Roman Catholic Church against each other.

The latest stage of this situation started with remarks of the present Archbishop, Dr Rowan Williams, on Prime Minister Gordon Brown's borrowing plans to provide a "fiscal stimulus" which would presumably lead us to liquidise what savings we have so that the freed money would mitigate the financial situation; Williams stated that it was like "the addict returning to the drug...What I'm worried about is anything that pushes us straight back into the kind of spiral we were in before". Ironically, his words encapsulated those of Prime Minister James Callaghan to the Labour Party Conference of September 1976:

We used to think that you could spend your way out of a recession and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending. I tell you in all candour that that option no longer exists, and in so far as it ever did exist, it only worked on each occasion since the war by injecting a bigger dose of inflation into the economy, followed by a higher level of unemployment as the next step.

In this curious game of theological tennis, Mr Brown replied that "we should not walk by on the other side when people are facing problems".

The next round is masterfully described by Cranmer in his post "Church of England unites to damn "morally corrupt" Labour. In the Sunday Telegraph of December 28, Jonathan Wynne-Jones reported that the Bishop of Manchester said Labour was "beguiled by money", the Bishop of Hulme added they were "morally suspect", the Bishop of Durham opined that they had reneged on their promises, and the Bishops of Winchester and Carlisle brought up the rear with the charge that ministers had squandered their opportunity to reform society.

The backlash is reported in today's Telegraph, where the intellectual tone was set by John McFall MP with "I don't know if at the bishops' palaces there has been too much mulled wine passed around over the past few days."

There is due to be a CofE synod in February, in which a debate on the financial crisis is expected to be highly critical of the government's handling of it. Look out for much mud-slinging and sleight-of-hand in the run-up.

One area for agitation will be, I believe, the Act of Settlement 1701, which basically ensures that nobody who is a Catholic, or who is married to one, may take the British throne or be in line to it. It is, of course, a deeply discriminatory piece of legislation - but when I worshipped for several decades in the Roman Catholic Church, I don't recall a single occasion when somebody said to me, "you know, the Act of Settlement really bothers me"; in fact, in Scotland, when you heard about it, you knew that the Scottish National Party and the Labour party were fighting over the Catholic vote, especially in parts of the politico-religious quagmire thereabouts where angels fear to tread.

There was much talk of the Act of Settlement when Peter Phillips, the Queen's older grandson, married Autumn Kelly earlier in 2008. Ms Kelly, born a Catholic, converted, and so the need to amend the Act didn't arise.

Not that the Act of Settlement hasn't been amended before - to allow Edward VIII to abdicate and marry his Mrs Simpson, and it can be amended again. For example, in the early '70's, when Prince Charles developed a relationship with Lucia Santa Cruz, daughter of the then Chilean Ambassador to London, there was talk among MP's that if the relationship should deepen, the necessary action could be taken to ensure that she could be Charles' queen. (In the event, the ships passed in the night, but not before Ms Cruz introduced her prince to Camilla Shand, now his wife. But that's another story.)

What will be interesting is what the Bishops make of Gordon Brown's remark about "not passing by on the other side". As well as a reference to the Good Samaritan, it's an echo of Margaret Thatcher's concept, first formulated in a 1968 lecture to the Conservative Political Centre, that "even the Good Samaritan had to have the money to help, otherwise he too would have had to pass on the other side".

The thing is, Thatcher, when elected in 1979, had to take care of the mess she inherited - somebody else mugged the man going to Jericho; the wounds of today's unfortunate traveller were inflicted by his rescuer. Brown seems to suffer from a political and financial version of Munchausen's syndrome by proxy: not so much a St Francis of Assissi as a Beverley Allitt - the children's nurse who poisoned babies in order to act the hero when she stepped in, and is consequently serving time for murder.

In a not dissimilar vein to the Archbishop's, the Pope warned that the world is "headed toward ruin if selfishness prevails over solidarity during tough economic times" in his Christmas message, but I doubt Mr Brown is ready to take on the man to whom he gave a copy of his father's sermons when he had an audience - and whose predecessor Margaret Thatcher praised many times in her political memoirs.

I hope we all stick together as far as is possible during what may be testing times. I would ask for your consideration of an alternative translation of Mt:22:21 - "give Caesar what Caesar deserves, and give God what God deserves."

a right to both sides of the story?

A Right to Life - and Death?
"Moral Dilemmas" series
Kenneth Boyd
Evans Brothers Limited 1999
First Paperback Editions 2003

As a fan of the great detectives from Sherlock Holmes to Morse I'm always intrigued by a mystery, and as it happens, the other day a mystery was posted through my letterbox.

The above book was sent to me by a worried parent whose son is studying RE (Religious Education) at Key Stage 4, or the first year of an RE GCSE in old money, and was given the book for a project.

The book is divided into six chapters: rights in general, abortion, fertility treatment, transplantation, rationing health care and dying well. I had a few concerns about the book in general, but the book's treatment of abortion is symptomatic of its approach.

The reader is given a worked example, and I hope I can be forgiven for quoting from this at length:

Kate is forty years old and has just discovered she is pregnant. She already has three children, two girls and a boy, aged seventeen, fifteen and and thirteen, respectively. A few years ago she and her husband, John, opened a small restaurant. It does well, but only because they both work very long hours. A month or so ago, rushing to catch the plane for their first weekend abroad for several years, Kate forgot to pack their oral contraceptives. She thought she was unable to conceive because of the time of the month, but when they got back home she was suspicious. She carried out a pregnancy test, and it was positive.

Kate and John discuss what they should do. All of their income goes on family expenses and the children's education. They can't afford to pay someone else to take on Kate's work while she has the baby, and if they are going to have another child, Kate wants to bring it up herself, as they did with the others before she went back to work.

They could give up their business and John could try to find another job. But they would earn a lot less and they would feel this would not be fair to their other children at this stage in their education. So, reluctantly, they decide to go to their doctor to ask if Kate can have an abortion. The doctor thinks that Kate and John have taken a responsible decision, and sends Kate to a hospital specialist who agrees to terminate her pregnancy. After further discussion with the doctors, Kate also has a sterilisation to prevent her having any further children.

Phew - there's so much going on in that extract it's hard to know where to start! For one thing, Kate and her husband went "reluctantly" to their doctor - why didn't the doctor pick up on this reluctance or, if you want, cognitive dissonance, and advise that they think about it?

For another, this dissonance is strengthened when we are told that "if they are going to have another child, Kate wants to bring it up herself", then we learn in the next paragraph that the poor woman has a sterilisation - so what form does the "further discussion with the doctors" take - do they have meaningful dialogue, or does this "discussion" takes place when she is having the procedure, possibly very emotional and vulnerable, with the doctors above her in every sense?

I could pick out many more things, but thirdly and lastly, I'm still concerned about Kate's sterilisation. Given that this is an early abortion, why do the doctors need to perform an invasive procedure going inside Kate's abdomen in order to ensure that the couple have no further children? Not much mystery there - the text says it's to prevent her from having further children. A shame, because it would be much simpler to perform a vasectomy, and any possible after-effects, say infection, would be far further from major organs. Perhaps John has something to tell her about his future procreative aspirations? And has she been given time to reflect that should she and her husband split up she is now infertile? I realise this isn't a post about marital fragility, but why, in our supposedly sexually emancipated society, are women expected to pay the price for their men's behaviour with and in their bodies?

All through the abortion section, there are panels giving opinions that I find one-sided. Please allow me to quote three of them. The first is from "Dr Daniel Callahan, Ethicist" in Abortion: Understanding Differences:

...abortion is a necessary evil, one that must be tolerated and supported until such time as better sex education, more effective contraception, and a more just social order make possible fewer troubled pregnancies. And even then, there will still be some justifiable reasons for abortion: it will never disappear.

The second is shot through with the cold utilitarianism of Mill senior, and comes from "Professor Roger Higgs, General Practitioner" in the 1997 BMJ (British Medical Journal) New Dictionary of Medical Ethics:

In practice, it has been shown that women usually take great thought and pains to identify and minimise the harms, balancing different and competing harms in a nuanced way in considering whether to keep or terminate a new pregnancy. Such down-to-earth examples of compromise might put ethicists, politicians, campaigners, and religious leaders to shame, and convert the general question to the particular: "How much should this possible new life matter, in this situation and at this stage?"

I might comment on the above, that Pope John Paul II, quoted in a post by Radagast, turns the question of the relationship between the general and the particular on its head to shine a light on Kant's categorical imperative, which states that we should react to each individual situation as if its solution constituted a general law: "the function of [conscience] is to apply the universal knowledge of the good in a specific situation and thus to express a judgement about the right conduct to be chosen here and now". (Veritatis Splendor (The Splendour of Truth), para 32).

The third and last quote, which we are told comes from "Mother of unborn Down's syndrome son", is shorter:

If women understood that late abortions don't have to cause lasting trauma, fewer would feel obliged to give birth to a handicapped child.

This quote from A Right to Life - and Death? vindicates Matthew Connelly's prophetic reference at the end of Fatal Misconception - the Struggle to Control World Population to people "faithfully reciting a eugenic catechism without the faintest idea of where it came from or where it can lead".

The mystery proper started when I started checking out the background to the book, when I kept getting a page on the Evans Publishing Group website saying "There were no matches for your search in the database. Please try again." Even when I managed to find a mention of the book on the publisher's site, when I clicked the link to the book I got the same screen.

And yet the book is in circulation. The Times Educational Supplement lists it in an article on "citizenship" books; East Lothian Council Library Service's TalisPrism search engine lists it in a mixed bag called the Coping Collection including also Alcohol, AIDS, and All by myself: the toilet training book; and I was initially worried to see that the independent children's books magazine Books for Keeps listed it in an article bemoaning the UK's rate of teenage pregnancies (by any definition abortion doesn't prevent pregnancy), but rather relieved that they included alongside it Cool and Celibate? Sex or no sex? by David Bull.

Further afield, New Zealand's Kids' Catalogue Web lists it as one of three books in a section called "Right to life juvenile literature", the other two being You wouldn't want to be a pyramid builder! and A to Zen: a book of Japanese culture.

The book certainly casts its net wide - in the first section, Rights, Life and Costs, there are pcitures of refugees in Rwanda, a public health scheme in Zaire ("poor countries have limited resources available and also find it difficult to provide services which will reach into the more remote areas of their often very large countries") and a vaccination scheme in India.

So it wasn't a surprise to find that A right to life - and death? is listed by Better World Books, which describes itself thus: "Better World Books collects and sells books online to fund literacy initiatives worldwide". It still froze my blood, though, to see that the project seems to have gotten the book into Botswana, where page 38 (41 in the .pdf linked to) it is listed under "moral education" in a "prescription list" of books for junior and senior secondary published by the country's Ministry of Education.

It may seem that I'm against teaching children of an appropriate age about abortion, contraception, etc. Actually, I'm not. I'm of a mind with Wendy Wright, chair of Concerned Women of America, who says that if teachers are presented with a controversial subject, they should teach both sides of the controversy (she was debating with Richard Dawkins on why she thought evolution should be taught in schools alongside creationism).

So, by all means, in state schools teach children that a woman has a right to choose abortion - as long as the un-negotiable humanity of the unborn baby is taught alongside and with equal value; show the results of studies showing that abortion has no side effects - as long as the many studies showing links to depression, breast cancer, later miscarriage, etc etc etc are presented alongside and with equal value; share the opinion that handicapped babies bring misery for themselves and hardship for their families into the world - as long as the objective value of all human beings from Steven Hawking to the kids in the special school down the road is taught alongside and with equal value.

It sounds a tall order, but anything else isn't education, it's propaganda. In fact, Sherlock Holmes' comment on The Strange Affair of A right to life - and death? might be the same as in The Adventure of the Devil's Foot: "To let the brain work without sufficient material is like racing an engine. It racks itself to pieces."

But I can't end this post with a quote from a fictional character. Here's the pro-choice author Linda Bird Francke in her painfully honest work The Ambivalence of Abortion, talking about her own early abortion in the introduction ("I waited for my husband to burst through the door and yell 'stop', but of course he didn't") and finishing the section by stating what she experiences in quiet moments: "I wave at the baby. 'Of course we have room', I cry to the ghost. 'Of course we do.'"

out of the mouth of madness

I've recently added In the Mouth of Madness to my list of favourite films. It begins with Sam Neill confined to an old-style asylum, and flashbacks flesh out the story, or alternatively peel the layers of sanity from John Trent's (Neill's character's) mind.

Perhaps the reason that particular film has been on my mind is that my own illness, manic-depression, is active again. No flying weetabix this time, merely an ineluctable descent into a pit whose bottom I can't yet see, accompanied by my sleep-wakefulness pattern flipping so that, cognitively, I'm on the nightshift.

Often an affective disorder such as mine varies in intensity during the day, a phenomenon known as diurnal variation. I've spent a lot of time in the bedroom in the last days until my mood's started to come round late on, because supportive although my family is at these times I'm aware that I don't want to push them too far by being conspicuously slowed-down and irritable in their midst. Yesterday, in fact, able to get a bit of strength together, I went out a took a bus ride while Minima and Minora were still at school, so that Maxima could get a bit of a rest.

As may be obvious I'm not at work right now. I may find it difficult to return, for reasons I can't go into right now due to contractual considerations. At night I'm applying for jobs online, things like working in cafés or libraries. But the prospect of not managing to return to work at all has been preying on my mind, so I got off the bus at the Jobcentre, where I explained the situation to the lady at the front desk.

"To receive Incapacity Benefit you would need your doctor to agree that you couldn't work," she said, with emphases so heavy that I'm not sure they shouldn't be in bold rather than in italics. I nodded and walked off, reminded of an acquaintance from the Cambridge Clubhouse - as was - who had his Incapacity Benefit stopped, and lost his appeal in no small part because he was able to appeal. One of the staff helped him get back about this, on the basis that his mental health problems were impacting on his mental state, not on his ability to pick up a pen and write. Recovered now, he's back at work programming computers.

For me, signing on to benefit would be the last resort of last resorts. I've nothing against people who are on benefits because they are unable to work, indeed at one point I was among their numbers. I find myself baulking at the prospect of returning for three reasons.

Firstly, I genuinely believe that work confers a dignity that is not attached to the size of the wage it brings in, something Pope John Paul II (a factory-worker during the Nazi occupation of Poland) referred to when he said, "the sources of the dignity of work are to be sought primarily in the subjective dimension, not in the objective one". It's good to come home and revel in that delicious change of mental scenery when work-related concerns are pushed out by Minora sings the latest song she's learnt at school, or relates how Kelsy told her that she heard from Dean that Sky says that James told Mrs Smith that...(do writers for soaps get their ideas from their children?)

Secondly, I am aware that a culture has arisen in Great Britain whereby people who could work don't want to, or don't want to do the work available, and I don't want locums etc who meet me to assume I'm part of this group. Ann Widdecombe found this in the course of making a documentary about Incapacity Benefit claimants. Martin Townsend, editor of the Sunday Express, wrote in a column called "Don't Call in Sick:

"Sickness absence accounts for £10billion [per year]...I’d like to believe that the vast majority of those claiming these benefits are doing so honestly. Indeed, I’m compelled to believe it every time I write about this subject because of the large numbers of letters I receive from genuinely sick and disabled readers pointing out how alienated they feel by the 'sick-note' tag."

Earlier this year, Townsend received the Mind Book of the Year for his The Father I Had, which details the relationship between the author and his father, who was manic-depressive. This brings me to the third reason: when you don't have to go somewhere at certain times to do certain things, then despite your best intentions there comes a time when you stop. Work keeps you going, because if you are well enough to do it, then you have no option but to keep going. It keeps you thinking, and if nothing else then hopefully you will have worked through the worst of your mental state before you get home.

Anecdotal evidence shows that people who are manic depressive can point to at least one person in their close family who either has been diagnosed with a similar disorder, or whose behaviour points to similar states of mind. If the worst comes to the worst and one of my daughters should inherit the condition, I don't want a great tranche of her memories of my coping mechanisms to be allowing myself to become "stopped" to the extent that I forgot how to work.

It's 2.25am. My mood's starting to lift, but I'd better get to bed so that I can be up early enough tomorrow morning to be at least tired by this time tomorrow night; that can be half the battle to get back to the plâteau between the valley of death and the Weetabix flightpath.

Please remember me and all like me in your prayers.

Related post: Mad about the fen

A land fit for workers

It appears that our Great Leader has given the Housing Minister, Caroline Flint, a knuckle-rapping over her proposition that tenants occupying lets in social housing, eg council houses, housing associations, should undertake skills audits and then undertake to seriously look for work as a condition of their tenancy.

This is rightly so: Mr Brown has every reason to fear a proposal to get unemployed people back to work, because it smacks of the sort of common sense which, if permitted to go unchecked, might win Labour another election instead of allowing it to head for the safe ground of being, in Labour MP Ian McCartney's words, the natural party of opposition. The scheme would also halt the drift of areas managed by registered social landlords into sink-estates that is presently ineluctable unless management committees and directors are foresightful and corageous enough to break their own golden rule and let families with members in employment jump the waiting list.

Not that pragmatism in the face of ideology has always been lacking in left-wing leaders. Labour's first Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, realised that when the Wall Street bubble burst during the first year of his second government, some tightening of the public spending belt was inevitable, and that this would have to include cutting unemployment benefit - the TUC's refusal to countenance which brought down the Labour-led Government. Socialists have detested MacDonald for his common-sense statemanship ever sinse.

Clement Attlee managed to guide Britain through the initial postwar period when Great Britain was fiscally drained, and oversee the introduction of the welfare state.

This was a truly inclusive project: under the orders of Tory premier Winston Churchill, Ernest Bevin, the Labour Minister of Employment, had commissioned William Beveridge, who would soon become a Liberal MP, to draft a plan for how Britain should unfold after the War.

Beveridge had the worthy vision of slaying the "Five Giants": Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalour and Idleness.

To pay for this, he envisaged the need for "full employment", ie an unemployment rate of less than 3%. Current unemployment in the UK is put at 5.3%, which seems not too much of an overshoot.

But the operative word in the above sentence is seems. In a documentary, Ann Widdecombe found that dole-office advisors in Barrow, where "only 20 per cent [of younger people] want a job and only 10 per cent are seeking one were encouraging people with minor ailments to register for incapacity benefit. And in Parliament, Stewart Jackson MP was presented with statistics on the amount of incapacity benefit claimants in Peterborough since 1997; but his interlocutor demurred from revealing what percentages the figures represented of Peterborough's population. A friend who works with vulnerable people assures me that Peterborough has the highest proportion of young people claiming incapacity benefit in East Anglia.

We now have the sort of situation where there can be "66% on benefits [and] marginal rates of taxation are at 75% and more, at the low end, ensuring no escape from poverty". Moreover, means-testing of benefits ensures, "at the low end", that if you get a job that does not pay the equivalent of incapacity/job-seeking benefit plus housing benefit plus council tax benefit, then the more you make the more you lose. If you have a family and earn just over the threshold for Working Families Tax Credit, which is not that high, then things are worse. I have been in this position. No wonder Frank Field, the Labour former Minister for Welfare who was fired for the unusual disloyalty of doing the job he was asked to do, said:

"The penalties means-tests impose on working, saving and honesty become apparent only later with an ever-growing proportion of the population having to think about how best to work this system. Equally importantly, this drive to even greater means-tested dependency is set to blow apart some of the key characteristics which underpin a common citizenship."

Another source "thinks the unthinkable" in the manner Mr Field was commissioned to do, if exaggerating somewhat for effect: "Would lifting the threat of economic destitution result in a flood of work-shy labourers overwhelming the public purse?" One is reminded of For the Benefit of Mr Parris, when the MP undertook to live on unemployment benefit in 1984 and found it harder to make ends meet than he had anticipated. But times have changed: even Freeview is poor man's meat, Sky or cable is de rigeur, and attempts to transcend means-tested benefits make it impossible to dress one's children in this week's latest fashion as modelled by whichever collective of singing mannequins has climbed the greasy pole today.

It's scary trying to get back into work after an enforced period on incapacity benefit. I know this. What is scariest is that - and this will sound astounding for a Scot to say - incapacity benefit rises every year, giving one an income that the sort of work available after a lengthy hiatus cannot compete with. No longer able to do the sort of jobs I had taken in the past, I was doing work experience as an office junior and doing it less well every day because I wasn't sleeping at night worrying over how I'd support my family if this particular job came on the market.

As it happened, thank God, a job came up that I was qualified to do that didn't involve the conditions that, while they may not have been responsible for my illness, I was keen to avoid because I was unsure if those I love could bear another stretch of coping with me at a Lovecraftian angle to the family. Perhaps one of the things that needs to change is that incapacity benefit should stay at the same level, in real terms, unless somebody is manifestly unable to work.

Sigmund Freud said that "Love and work are the cornerstones to our humanness". But sane people have also wrote on the dignity of work: for example, Pope John Paul II (a former factory-worker) commented in 1981 that "work is one of the characteristics that distinguish man from the rest of creatures", and also observed that "the sources of the dignity of work are to be sought primarily in the subjective dimension, not in the objective one".

In other words, this is just one way of saying that there's a dignity to work which is not fixed to the size of the wage that a job attracts. Let the Joneses keep up with each others' ulcers: the point is to go to a given place at a prescribed time, do certain things, and interact with different groups of people in the appropriate ways so that you feel that the world is - ever so slightly - changed because you did your job. I don't see us getting Sky or cable in the near future, but when I come home tired, my children at least know that I'm doing something that makes days off special, and attainment of more highly-valued qualifications than mine worth working for. And whether they end up renting their houses from the council or a housing association, or even buying them, I want them to experience the discipline upon your thoughts and emotions that remaining in a job imposes upon you, and builds you up to be a resource for the community. Hopefully it will be a community where the workless can look through the window at those who contribute to society and say, with aspiration rather than greed, "I want that".

will he explain?

Towards the end of December, Anne Widdecombe wrote a very balanced piece analysing former PM Tony Blair's decision to convert to Roman Catholicism, and raised the issue - fairly, I felt - that given his consistent pro-choice voting record on, for example, abortion and embryo experimentation, it is incumbent upon Blair to at least explain this in the public arena.

Blair's reception into the Catholic church has kept many columnists in beer-money, but not all have got Miss Widdecombe's point. Writing in the 12 January issue of The Spectator, Charles Moore throws a not-very-veiled accusation of hypocrisy at Miss Widdecombe when he asks "Doesn't it occur to her that she, as a Catholic, should be killing the fatted calf in Blair's honour?"

The Society for the Protection of Unborn Children has written to Mr Blair and it is perhaps ironic that given the timing of his conversion the letter was published just before the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord. It quotes from Evangelium Vitae (on the value and inviolability of human life) Paragraph 73, which states that to "take part in a propaganda campaign in favour of such a law [in favour of abortion or euthanasia], or to vote for it" is never justified.

Although this is a document from a Pope, it addresses an issue that applies to all of humankind. Surely the keystone right of all human rights, however you define the term, is the right to life, because without a living subject the other rights might as well have been written by Spike Milligan on speed. (In legal terms, a foetus becomes a person upon its first breath, it is true: but no matter what you think of this definition, it has to be admitted that "legalese" is a specialised technical language for use in court and between lawyers, and its terms do not always correspond with the dictionary definitions of words. In this language a limited company is a person, but nobody gets charged for murder if one goes bust.) Pope John Paul II recognised the universal import of the primacy of the right to life by addressing Evangelium Vitae to "all people of good will". He cites St Paul, who said that "the requirements of the law are written on [our] hearts, [our] consciences also bearing witness".

However, if you are a Roman Catholic, then it is not controversial to state that you should try to obey the Pope. Catholics believe, moreover, that the Pope, united with the Bishops of the world in the teaching authority of the Church, can make an infallible statement which Catholics have to abide by when the Pope is speaking in the realm of faith and morals. Spotting infallible statements has become a growing industry within and outwith the RC Church, as they aren't always signposted. But in the case of Evangelium Vitae John Paul II does everything but supply a neon sign announcing that an infallible statement is contained inside. He starts by stating that the Second Vatican Council "addressed the matter forcefully, in a brief but incisive passage" which is from Gaudium et Spes (The Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World). The passage isn't long; having been published in 1965 it could have been written yesterday, and is worth looking at:

"whatever is opposed to life itself, such as any type of murder, genocide, abortion, euthanasia or wilful self-destruction, whatever violates the integrity of the human person, such as mutilation, torments inflicted on body or mind, attempts to coerce the will itself; whatever insults human dignity, such as subhuman living conditions, arbitrary imprisonment, deportation, slavery, prostitution, the selling of women and children; as well as disgraceful working conditions, where men [sic] are treated as mere tools for profit, rather than as free and responsible persons; all these things and others of their like are infamies indeed. They poison human society, but they do more harm to those who practice them than those who suffer from the injury. Moreover, they are supreme dishonor to the Creator." (para 27)

John Paul II continues in Evangelium Vitae:

"Therefore, by the authority which Christ conferred upon Peter and his Successors, and in communion with the Bishops of the Catholic Church, I confirm that the direct and voluntary killing of an innocent human being is always gravely immoral."

I've come all this way to show that Blair, having taken this decision to join the Catholic Church that he appears to have been planning for some time, owes an explanation to Catholics as to why he has voted the way he has on life issues while he was limbering up to swim the Tiber, and another one to Anglicans as to why their Church was good enough while he was Prime Minister, then seemed lacking somehow once he had stepped down. Nobody's asking for a public show of repentance, that's between him and God, something along the lines of "I did x because y" would at least show an awareness on his part that more was expected from him - not least from all of those Christians outwith the RC Church who have a deep respect for life.

Perhaps it was once the case, as Ann Widdecombe says, that Blair felt he could "do what he liked, whenever he liked, and how dare anyone else get in the way". Perhaps those days only ever existed in the minds of sychophants seeking promotion and he was taken in.

But now he needs to have the courage of his convictions to say that he believes that some things are objectively right, and others objectively wrong. The only alternative to this is to make major moral decisions on the basis of how you feel when you get out of bed. That's no way to "build up treasure in heaven that will not be exhausted, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys" (Luke 12:33). The road to Hell is lined with wobbly-lipped soundbites; let Mr Blair stand up in good conscience and for good conscience.